Autumn Leaves and the Endless Fall
by otherworldviolet
Summary: Kitty dies. This is about what happens next. B/K.
1. Prologue

**PROLOGUE.**

The house is in a quiet street, tree-lined and green, dressed in the smell of old wood and tile and the sound of birdsong. It's not the biggest house, or the richest, or the most extravagantly furnished, but it is good enough for one of simple tastes.

In the herb patch an industrious caterpillar works its way through the parsley. The tap nearby drips into a conscientiously placed bucket. The front door, its once green paint slowly peeling, is open to let in the warm summer breeze.

Follow it through, down a narrow corridor hung with sketches of distant lands in distant times.

A small kitchen off to one side. Dishes in the sink. A kettle on the stove. One of the cupboard doors hangs off its hinges. Beneath, an impressive collection of pillboxes spread across the rust-red tiles.

In the main room candles, their wax still soft, litter every surface: the out-of-tune piano, the yard sale dresser, the square dining table barely big enough for two. The smell of burnt herbs and brimstone clings to the bare wooden rafters.

And, in the centre of the room, the threadbare carpet pulled aside to expose two rough pentacles painted straight onto the floorboards.

Move further. Up the creaking stairs, past the bedroom with its unmade bed and a bathroom littered with damp towels, towards the study.

The muddle and mess here is different, more desperate, more urgent. A bookshelf upended, spilling ancient words across the carpet. The body of a middle aged woman, her grey hair half teased from a loose bun. And beside her, a blackened scorch mark.

Outside the window, the urgent bleat of an emergency siren startles a flock of sparrows.


	2. Part 1

**PART 1.**

The young man triple-checks the markings on the floor against the pictures in his dusty, borrowed book. He didn't draw these pentacles. They've been hidden in the bowels of Whitehall, unused for nearly thirty years, but he was assured that they were perfectly safe.

_ Assured._ By people that weren't putting their lives in danger. By people that weren't reviving an all but dead art just to acquiesce to the demands of a mad old woman.

He pushes his horn-rimmed glasses up his nose, squinting at the unfamiliar marks. The old woman assured him that the demon wasn't dangerous, but he knew as well as anyone that Devereaux's parliament had been_ eaten_ because someone gave a djinni too much leash.

Clutching his instructions in a sweaty hand, he steps into the smaller pentacle and begins the incantation.

Nothing happens.

For the first minute, anyway.

Then his world, his ideas about what was and wasn't possible, everything collapses. His eyes dart to the guttering candles, then back to the paper where the incantation is laid out in easy, phonetic text. The dark lines of the larger pentacle go red as though the very fires of hell are burning under the stone floor. Black smoke curls around the base, at first thin and translucent, but thickening by the second. The young man stutters, but continues reading.

A sound like a whip crack. Inside the pentacle, the smoke spins like a tornado. Three long silver claws rake the invisible barrier that keeps the demon trapped.

The young man solemnly folds his damp papers. He pushes his glasses up his nose again and brushes his flame red hair away from his sweaty forehead. The demon is his. It is bound. He is safe.

"D-demon."

The apparition growls from within its shroud of smoke. Its claws glint in the long candlelight.

"You will – you will recognise me as your master."

A hollow laugh. It echoes, as if it were in a much larger room. "There is but one master in this wretched place I recognise," it rumbles. "_And you are not she._"

The young man fumbles with his papers again. He swallows. "My–"

"What date is it?" The demon swirls as if to face him, and the young man can almost pick out two narrow eyes through the fug.

"I – I don't -"

"I can't have been in the Other Place for more than a few days." The candle flames behind it grow to furious length, illuminating a monstrous winged silhouette.

"It -"

"So _please_, human. Tell me just how long Kitty had to be dead before some _idiot _magician decided to enslave me again."

"K-Kitty?" The young man screws up his face in confusion. "You mean Ms Kathleen Jones?"

The demon dispels its smoke with one mighty beat of its wings. "_Who_," it spits, "_else_."

The young man can't help taking a step back. The thing is horrifying, standing on clawed feet with its knees going the wrong way and huge black bat's wings bursting from the narrow shoulders. Somehow the young Middle Eastern face doesn't mitigate the matter at all. It hunches dourly in its pentacle, clawed hands bunched into tight fists.

"Please!" The young man holds up a hand as if to protect himself from the apparition. "I'm here under her orders!"

The demon turns its dark gaze directly on him. "She is dead," it says flatly.

* * *

><p><em>Kitty tidied the house before she made the summoning. She trusted Bartimaeus enough not to literally rip her limb from limb, but the djinni certainly wasn't above ripping her a<em> figurative _new one, and the last time she invited him to join her in the corporeal realm he had made a number of pejorative comments about her housekeeping skills. Hopefully this time he'd have to try a little harder to find something to give her grief about._

_The pentacles she had painted on the floor (some years ago, how time got away from her) were starting to peel, but they would serve. They needed repainting, she knew, but her hands shook so much these days. No reason to worry about that now. She set herself the task of finding matches._

_After at least ten minutes of going through what felt like every drawer in the house, she heaved a chair into the smaller pentacle – cursing the damn thing all the while for getting heavier every time she had to do this – and sat down. She gave herself a minute or so to catch her breath, then she let the familiar syllables weave into the incense and reach out to the Other Place._

_And then, like she had been all her adult life, she waited for him, counting the long seconds under her breath._

_Kitty stepped out of her pentacle before the silvery mist opposite her had even finished contracting into the grinning form of Ptolemy. "Bartimaeus, I'm sorry, I -"_

_"Always 'sorry' with you," the Egyptian boy said, waggling a cheeky finger at her. "If I've told you once, I've told you a hundred times: summon me when you like."_

_A little smile pulled at the corners of her mouth. "I know." And, if she wasn't mistaken, his expression softened too - away from his usual impish cheek to something more gentle, even tender._

_"So!" Bartimaeus said sharply, clapping his hands and effectively murdering whatever moment had been going on between them. "What vastly important matter has you drawing on my unearthly powers? Is there another mouse behind the fridge that you need me to slay?"_

_If anything, that only made Kitty look even more apologetic. "I'm trying to move a bookshelf."_

_"So, what you're trying to say is, triumphal songs will be sung about it for the next thousand years?"_

_"Of course. It's through here."_

_Kitty had clearly made an effort at moving the bookshelf on her own, if the thirty centimetres away from the wall in her living room were anything to go by. Bartimaeus took one look at it and said so. "And really," he went on, "how long did it take you to realise that there was no conceivable way you could get it up the stairs all by yourself? Really Kitty, I never thought you could compete with my genius, but I had hoped you were smarter than the average amoeba."_

_Kitty didn't dignify that with a response. Almost thirty years of dealing with his potshots at her intelligence and species meant it would take more than that to get under her skin._

_Bartimaeus sized up his current charge, hands on hips. "This looks like it calls for something… Bigger, don't you think?" He grinned over his shoulder at her and his body_ swelled_. His bare legs erupted with fur, knees turning backwards, narrow chest expanding, two elegant horns curling out on top of a face no longer anywhere near human, but still wearing the same grin._

_"You'll use any excuse to pull out that guise, won't you," she said, affecting disinterest._

_"You love it." With surprisingly little fanfare, Bartimaeus picked up the whole thing, careful to tilt it backwards so all the books didn't fall out. "Now, where do you want this thing?"_

_Kitty spun on her heel, not watching the way the muscles in his back moved under the bookshelf's weight. "Upstairs, if you please. My study."_

_"Yes sir, milady."_

_He followed her, steps heavy and creaking on the stairs behind her. Her heart was racing, and dear God did that sound pathetic. Barely five minutes in his company, and this was how she found herself? _Think about something else, anything else._ "I still wish you hadn't eaten that mouse," she said with a grimace._

_"_You_ asked me to deal with it. So I dealt with it." The djinni pouted. It looked very odd on his minotaur face. "You didn't have to watch."_

* * *

><p>"I feel we have gotten off on the wrong foot," the young mansays carefully. "I summon you under orders. I have no wish to, um, <em>enslave <em>you." He pauses, taking in the demon's disbelieving stare. "We don't do that in London any more."

The demon waves a clawed hand at him. "And yet."

The young man coughs. "Just so I am sure before I do this... You _are _Bartimaeus? Of Uruk? Sakhr al-Jinni? The Serpent of -"

"Silver Plumes?" The demon scoffs. "Of course I am. Don't you understand at _all_ how summoning works?"

The young man takes a nervous breath. "My name is Howard Kent," he manages, through gritted teeth.

The demon bares its yellow fangs. "I'm not interested in your fake little name, boy."

The young man screws his eyes shut. "It's not a fake name."

For a split second, the demon looks stupefied. "And you would just tell me that because...?"

"Ms Jones is alive. She wants you to go to her."


	3. Part 2

**PART 2.**

Kitty dreams.

She carves out a space here, keeping herself separate, and around her images swim. A quiet room and a smiling boy. A monster in a pentacle. Laughter and books. The times when she was happy reflected in a pair of black eyes.

All the colours around her swirl in celestial harmony. Perhaps she should be afraid - once, forever ago, she was - but the energy around her folds her in this time, taking her thoughts and fears and most private shames and accepts them. Accepts her.

And, for the eternity that was only a bare few seconds, she just lets herself _be.  
><em>

* * *

><p><em>Forbidden<em>

_Can beauty tame the demon?_

_A new play by award-winning playwright Timothy K Richardson_

"_Will challenge you, entice you... A tour de force of controversial storytelling." - Cashmere Magazine_

"_You have got to be kidding me." Kitty yanked the poster down in disbelief. _

_Bartimaeus poked his head over her shoulder. "Ooh, what's that?"_

_Kitty's nose wrinkled in distaste. "The girl's even fainting. Oh, and the spirit has yellow eyes so you _know_ he's a demon. And are his ears pointed?" she groaned. "They are. It's _Swans of Araby_ all over again."_

"_Swooning," Bartimaeus pointed out._

_Now it was Kitty's turn to look confused. "What?"_

"_She's swooning, not fainting."_

_Kitty treated him to one of her patented you're-not-being-funny-you-know frowns. _

"_I wouldn't expect you to know what a swoon is. You not being the swooning type and all."_

_She looked at Bartimaeus, wearing his street guise of a breathtakingly handsome young man with dark curls that fell into eyes that sometimes shone gold in the sunlight and had a grin that sometimes made her grit her teeth in frustration and more often made her worries melt away, and then she punched him. _

_He rubbed his arm in mock resentment. "You're so grumpy before you get your morning coffee. Come on." _

.

.

.

_He set the steaming mug in front of her and sat opposite. _

"_It doesn't offend you?" she asked as he slid into his seat. "It's just so... Unrealistic. I've never seen any references to anything like that... Not that I've looked or anything," she added quickly. _

_Bartimaeus fixed her with a disbelieving stare. "Really Kitty. I thought you had at least _some_ imagination. I've been the slave of magicians – who, I might add, are used to getting their own way – for over _five thousand years_ and you think that not one of them has looked at a shape-changing djinni and considered the possibilities?" He huffed. "You can be adorably naïve."_

"_That's horrible." Kitty put down her coffee with a clunk. "I mean, I knew the old government was awful, but to, to _violate_ their spirits on that level..."_

"_Oh, I suppose it happened more often before the Common Era..." Bartimaeus said thoughtfully. "These days it's all _demons are wicked and will hurt you when they can._ But back then... Well. It was more like _lie back and think of Mesopotamia_."_

_Her drink tasted bitter all of a sudden. She stirred more sugar into it. "So you had to? You've... done that before? Gone all _Swans of Araby_ on someone because you were_ ordered to_?"_

"_Of course." The djinni flashed a toothy grin. "But I've done it without orders too."_

"What?_" Kitty burst out, then leant forward across the table. "Oh, You are such a liar. You think flesh is disgusting."_

_If anything, Bartimaeus only showed more teeth at that. "Oh yes. But occasionally appetising. It's like, hmm... You know fried food's bad for you, but sometimes you can't help it. I could tell you some stories..."_

"_Please," Kitty pleaded, covering her horrified expression with her hands. "Don't."_

"_There was this vestal virgin back in Rome," Bartimaeus sniggered, "who wasn't a virgin in the_ least _when I was done with her. And Nefertiti! Sometimes I think the only reason I ended up on the wrong side of that revolution was Akhenaten trying to keep me out of her bedchamber. And who do you think 'comforted' poor Gilgamesh after he lost dear Enkidu? Well, half of Uruk actually, the guy got around, but he fit me in somewhere."_

_Kitty pointed the finger of accusation at him, trying – and failing – to keep a straight face. "You're awful."_

_Bartimaeus ran slender fingers through his dark curls. "I like to think of myself as a charming rapscallion," he said sniffily. Then he got a truly evil expression and leant forward so they were almost nose to nose. "And if you really want to know? This was the form that we did it in."_

"_Bartimaeus!"_

_His laughter rang out, her point of brightness in the dingy cafe.  
><em>

* * *

><p>Kitty forces her heavy eyelids open.<p>

Everything hurts. She feels compressed and strange, and every one of the tiny pains that her body throws at her on a daily basis comes back full force and, somewhere above the pain, her higher self wonders if this is what a summoning feels like.

With a deep sigh she relaxes back into the pillows, waiting for it to subside into the dull ache that had been her constant companion ever since she'd landed herself here.

Then, she smiles. Even in her current state of wooziness she recognises that voice.

"Kitty, Kitty _Jones. _I want to know which room -"

"Sorry kid, visiting hours aren't for another hour or so, we can only let you in if you're family..."

"If you don't take your hands off me you'll get a detonation in the face, I swear to Marduk."

Her laugh is strained and quickly divulges into a cough. Her throat is still sore from the intubation, but the pain just reminds her that she's still here, and she's still alive, and that now... He's here too.

Bartimaeus, wearing the guise of a dark-skinned young man that she thought she'd never see again, swaggers into the room in that way he has, like he's the best thing ever to happen to it. And Kitty smiles because, to her, he is.

"You really know how to scare a djinni, don't you?" His hands are planted on his narrow hips, head cocked to one side.

Kitty does her best to give him a sarcastic shrug. If that's how he wants to play this, she's happy to play along. "I try."

For a split second, his bravado shatters before her and he looks exactly as young as he isn't and as scared as he shouldn't be. Kitty knows she looks awful – pale and thin and washed out in this washed out room – and if he doesn't make some comment making fun of it she's worried any sense of normalcy will be completely out of their reach.

Thankfully, it's gone as quickly as it appeared. Bartimaeus throws himself dramatically into the guest chair, hooking one ankle on the end of her bed. "I guess it's my fault for worrying about you, anyway. I should have known you wouldn't have a bar of that 'death' thing. Not my Kitty Jones." He winks. "Nice move bullying that idiot Kent kid into summoning me, by the way."

"Couldn't leave you relaxing in the Other Place." Kitty resists the urge to reach out to him. "You'd get lazy."

"Lazy? Me?" Bartimaeus lets out an exaggerated yawn. "Never."

A tired smile pulls at the edges of Kitty's lips and, as always, she's just thankful that he's here.

"Rest," he says, returning the sentiment. "I'll be here when you wake up."

The words mount up on her tongue. There's so much she has to tell him. But, for now, her exhaustion gets the better of her.

* * *

><p><em>Halfway up the stairs, Kitty had to stop to catch her breath. <em>

_It had never happened before, and that worried her. Her body let her down more and more each day - with its little aches and niggling pains and expanding web of wrinkles, and the stairs had always been hard on her stiff knees… Her hand tightened around the banister, veins and tendons popping out as if trying to escape. _

"_Kitty?"_

_She forced herself to stand up straight. "I'm fine," she said, with all the bravado she didn't feel. "Just tired. You're not -" _gasp_ - "exactly easy to yank out of the Other Place, you know."_

"_Well, I am a fearsome spirit of vast powers and ancient origin." _

_Kitty barked a laugh when said fearsome spirit carefully wrapped his sinewy tail around her waist to steady her. "Very fearsome."_

"_Don't you forget it." _

* * *

><p>The afternoon sun floods the room with golden light, and the Egyptian boy's dark skin glows. <em>So, <em>Kitty realises sleepily, _he's back in Ptolemy's form. He always does that when he's worried. _

"Good morning," he says without turning around. "Or, should I say, afternoon. But I suppose I can give you a pass considering your condition."

Kitty coughs. "How magnanimous of you."

"Only for you." Bartimaeus stretches, his long, thin fingers curling high above his head. "How long are you meant to stay in this dull little place, anyway? I've only been here an hour, and I'm already bored out of my skull."

Kitty looks away. "It is… Rather constricting, isn't it?"

"Well, it's better than a tiny jar bobbing in the Red Sea, but I get your point."

Kitty laughs. It hurts. And she can't bring herself to tell him the truth.

"And when I get out of here I won't smell terribly of sesame oil." He grins at her over his narrow shoulder.

"No," she agrees. "Just disinfectant. And I actually _like _the smell of sesame oil."

"Nothing but for the best part of a century really puts you off, believe me."

Kitty takes a deep breath. She's run through this conversation in her head a hundred times since she woke up here, thought up a hundred different ways to breach the subject. But, in the end, she just blurts it out.

"I was in the Other Place."


	4. Part 3

Bartimaeus goes completely still, frozen in place as if he were cast in bronze. Time gets away from her again, sitting there helplessly, just waiting for a reaction, any reaction… A minute stretches out before her and it feels like hours.

"B?" She sounds tentative and small, and the sight of him - not just _Bartimaeus_, but the body he's wearing - twists a cold knife into her already damaged heart.

He shudders at that. His hands twitch. And, finally, he speaks. One little word, whispered with equal parts wonder and fear. "How?"

"I don't know."

"You weren't anywhere near the pentacles. And you - you weren't in any shape to say any kind of incantation…" He draws his shoulders up, hunching in on himself.

"Kitty. You _died._ I _saw_ you die."

Kitty forces a laugh. "Just for a couple of minutes." She can almost see the cogs in his mind turning, like he's trying to convince himself that she's crazy, that she only thought she was in the Other Place because her body was shutting down and that's how she interpreted it. His disbelief isn't surprising, but she just wishes he'd turn around so she could see his face, so he could see the truth written all over hers. "B?" she says again, pleading this time. "Would you just look at me?"

He turns. Slowly, like he's forcing himself to do it.

"I was _there_, B. Don't forget, I've been there before, I know what it's like. It was only a couple of minutes, but it felt like I was there for days." She catches his gaze and holds it. His eyes are wide and huge. "It was like… My body, this _place_, didn't want me any more. So I - everything that makes me _me_ - went through the Gate again. And it got me thinking. If that happened to me, then…" She takes a deep breath. "It must have happened for Ptolemy, too."

She paints his thoughts on over his unreadable expression. Is he wondering how much more restful the Other Place was for him since Ptolemy's death? How it felt when he was finally dismissed after a long toil on earth, wrapping himself up in the comforting chaos of home? Did a summoning hurt him more these days? Was it not just the pain of separation from the multitude, but the pain of separation from the only being he'd ever loved?

* * *

><p><em>They buried Nathaniel yesterday. <em>

_She'd never seen such a spectacle made out of the loss of one man. There had been eulogies, but none made by anyone that knew him. She heard the word 'tragedy' near on a hundred times, and 'hero' a hundred more. They called him an 'exemplary magician' for his 'noble sacrifice', and didn't that just drown her in irony, and then dropped him in the ground under a headstone with the wrong name on it._

_The coffin was closed the whole time. But the contents probably weren't recognisable anyway. _

_They buried Nathaniel yesterday, but she still couldn't believe he and Bartimaeus were dead. _

_So Kitty paced, running her fingers through her silver hair, her still bright eyes darting to the pentacles she'd scrawled on the floor in a moment of weakness. Was she really, seriously, considering this? _

_And, more worryingly, was she even up to it? _

_That thought made up her mind. Only a coward would back out of attempting a summoning just because she felt a little tired. And when there was no answer from the Other Place, at least she would know._

_She stepped into the pentacle, and spoke the words. Counted the seconds for her incantation to reach the Other Place. _

_At first, she thought the hesitant little curl of smoke was just her imagination, a mirage built out of her blind hope and stubbornness. But it thickened, curling and spinning up towards the ceiling like a tornado, and she _smiled_, huge and wide as she never had before._

_Show over, the tornado compressed itself into the form of a boy, but not the boy she expected. _

_He was younger than she'd ever seen him, with an innocence in the stubborn expression that belied the blind ambition underneath. _

_Her smile evaporated. She had always thought of Bartimaeus as a child - that dark-skinned boy that died for him longer ago than she can comprehend - but she'd never seen him look so young. _

"_Hi," said the boy that looked like Nathaniel._

* * *

><p>She knows how his mind works, the twisting flames of it devouring every possibility faster than she ever could. She looks into his face – not really his, but the dutiful portrayal of a boy long dead kept alive in the essence of a being she would never properly understand – and sees the black eyes flicker with hope.<p>

"Kitty -"

She cuts him off. "You could see Ptolemy again." Her voice is soft, uncertain. "If you wanted to. We could… _I_ could… Summon him."

With those two little words, all of his carefree wit, all of his hard won affection, disappears.

The temperature drops in a room already cold with medicine and machines. His expression hardens, slowly, into a dark look of contempt. A heavy shadow falls across him, and when he speaks, his voice carries with it all the scorn his kind has for hers.

"You mentally deficient, ignorant _child._" His lip curls. "To even suggest such a thing."

She feels fear wrapping its cold hands around her and she's seventeen again, making infantile suggestions to an ancient creature. Her ears clog with her own stupidity, vision clouded with it, and the quickening _beepbeepbeep_ next to her barely registers.

* * *

><p><em>The minotaur dropped the bookshelf from such a height that she worried its weight would send it crashing right back to where it came from. Kitty shook her head and made a beeline for the chair. The climb had left her feeling light-headed. <em>

_Bartimaeus, his cloven hooves clop-clopping across the wooden floorboards, headed for her desk and its organised scholastic chaos. The thoughtful look on his bull's face forced a smile from her. "The project's moving along, I see," he said, picking up a handful of carefully typed papers in a brawny fist. _

"_Slowly," she admitted. "I think I've got most of what I want to say in there somewhere. The basics, anyway. The Gate, and such."_

_Bartimaeus nodded, running his beady yellow eyes across the script impossibly fast. _

_Nervousness wheedled its way into her chest. "What..." she hesitated, caught her breath."What do you think?"_

"_Not bad, not bad." He finished his third page with a flourish, whipping it to the back __of the sheaf. "It sure does read like a commoner wrote it, but you could have done much worse." He glanced over at her, his big mouth twisted in a grin. "I could go over the lot for you, if you want. Make it sound a little more respectable?"_

_Kitty tried to speak. Her chest hurt. All she managed was a little whimper. _

"_Kitty?" _

_She hit the floor._

* * *

><p>The door bursts open and the otherworldly fire that had been smoldering around the djinni disappears as quickly as it appeared.<p>

"Ms Jones?" The nurse runs to her side, trying to steal her attention. Unwillingly, she gives it. "Ms Jones, I need you to relax… Doctor!"

Suddenly, a man in a white coat shouting orders.

Suddenly, hands on Bartimaeus' narrow shoulders.

Before the sedatives hit her, she hears his last words, spat out in bitter haste.

"I was leaving anyway."

She lets her head fall back into the pillows.


	5. Interlude

INTERLUDE.

The bronze statue stands at the centre of the square. The figure – a young man in a long, billowing coat with a long staff held in a muscular, outstretched arm – surrounds himself with an air of mysterious purpose, face set permanently in an expression of hardy determination. He is strong. Implacable. Invincible.

The memorial plaque, complete with dry things like names and dates and nothing about the hot, sweaty, human fear associated with it by anyone that was actually _there_, is currently obscured because Bartimaeus* is sitting on it, wondering when he became such a glutton for punishment.

[He has taken the form of an elegant spaniel, fur shining golden in the dying sunlight, though exactly why he couldn't say.]

Once, some years ago now, he had had vague plans to vandalise it in some way. One night, after Kitty had fallen asleep, he'd even come here, arms full of spraypaint and anger, with that express purpose. But something – some _feeling_ – made him pause, and he spent that night cleaning the damn thing instead.

He had never told Kitty that.

There's a lot he's never told her.

Like how beautiful she is to him. Even with her lined face and her bone deep tiredness and her aura that shone like none he'd ever seen.

That was his biggest regret, those everlong moments in the Other Place when he thought he'd lost her.

He shuts that thought down. No matter how many humans and djinn he'd dallied with over the years – and there had been more than he'd like to mention – it didn't do to have squishy feelings about anyone. It only lead to moments like this, with the pain of incarnation only secondary to a deeper sadness about the damned transitory nature of it all.

Clumping footsteps in too-big shoes let him know he's not alone.

He turns his round, sad eyes up to take a look at this intruder on his morose reverie. A child, dirty and possibly female, stares down at him.

"You're a demon," it says, eyes narrowed in suspicion.

The elegant spaniel cocks its head to one side, doing its best to appear confused. "I can assure you, I'm not," he replies smoothly.

"You are." The child crosses her (he's ninety percent sure it's a she) arms across her skinny chest. "You've got a big shiny light all around you."

The magic-mongering magicians of London may have been overthrown, but it appeared that people like Kitty were still popping up all over the place. "I'm no demon, kid." The spaniel turns its nose up. "I'm a djinni."

"Oh." The child nods. "What's a jinny?"

Bartimaeus bares his teeth in a not completely unthreatening doggy grin. "Don't you have parents you can ask about that?"

"Mum's busy." The child points towards a pub on the other side of the square.

He takes a moment to consider something. "What's your name, kid?"

"Daisy."

Appropriate. She looks like she'd barely crawled out of the dirt. "I am a spirit," he says smoothly, "ancient and terrible, drawn from my home of chaos against my will, to fulfil whatever sordid little charge my current master devises for me. Good enough answer for you?"

Daisy looks him up and down, critical the way only children can be. His form is perfect, as they always are, but his long-haired tail twitches hither and thither like the tail of an irritated housecat. "I suppose," she says and, rather presumptuously, sits down next to him on stone still warm from the afternoon sun. "Is that why you're here, then? Doing some job for some stuffy old magician?"

'_Your charge is thus: to go to Kitty Jones, and listen to whatever suggestion she makes. Um, that's it. Just listen.'_

"Not... Exactly." The charge was vague, anyway. And he had listened.

They sit in silence, watching the sun gently setting behind London's ancient architecture. Bartimaeus is the one that breaks it.

"Kid." He sounds much less brash than he intended. "If you knew someone – and really knew someone, like for over thirty years knew them -"

The girl gives him a disparaging look. "I'm nine."

"Oh, use your imagination." He takes a deep breath. It isn't necessary, but it helps. "So you know this person. Inside and out. And you're happy to call them a friend, despite certain misfortunes of birth that mean she'll never be anywhere _near _you intelligence wise..."

"Get to the point, jinny."

No nonsense. Bartimaeus decides to go ahead and like her. "I'm not sure there is a point. She died. She got better. Now she wants to to the worst thing possible to an old friend of mine, and I know she won't understand why she can't." He laughs, mostly at himself. "She's not the type to do as she's told."

The kid looks confused, and Bartimaeus doesn't blame her. She's a tiny human speck with no capacity for understanding.

"At least she's not dead."

Bartimaeus drags his eyes away from the sky to look over at her.

"My dad died," she explains. "Now mum drinks. So I'm glad she's not dead. At least you can talk to alive people."

Later, after he's sent the kid home with her terrified and rapidly sobering up mother, he flies back to the hospital to properly fulfil his charge.


	6. Part 4

**PART 4. **

She wakes to a hesitant tap-tapping against the window glass. For a moment she considers lying still, pretending she isn't awake because she still doesn't know what to say to him. Her everything hurts – her broken body, the dripline feeding medicines (at best, a stall) directly into her bloodstream, the leaden chain of her guilt tying her down.

But she made sure the window was left open for him. Just in case.

"You can come in," she says, her voice dry and scratchy from her restless nap.

The tiny owl awkwardly levers itself into the room, offering only a sad little hoot in greeting. Kitty pushes herself up into an almost-sitting position, and distracts herself by pouring a glass of water. The owl perches gingerly on the back of the guest chair, its golden eyes focussed on a point somewhere behind her head.

* * *

><p>"<em>If you're not going to help, the least you could do is make yourself look reasonable," Kitty complained. She was elbow-deep in washing up, a situation that had only eventuated due to the way her so-called friend had described her kitchen, and found it highly troubling that he now refused any kind of assistance that wasn't cheekily pointing out any bits she'd missed while buzzing around as the world's most irritating beetle. <em>

"_I _would _take a larger form, but I'm afraid there just isn't any room." Bartimaeus alighted on the tap, shiny blue carapace folding neatly over his delicate wings. "And all that _water._ I'm afraid that does not do a djinni's essence any good, goodness me no."_

"_B, if you don't pick up a damned washcloth right now, I will dunk you in here." _

_He tilted something that could have been a face up at her. "You wouldn't."_

_Kitty lifted a dripping hand. "Try me."_

_Bartimaeus gave a deep sigh, rolled his possibly-eyes, and changed. A brow-beaten, but still very pretty, Roman slave-girl stood beside her, her shapely legs barely concealed by a torn tunic. _

"_What would you have me do, great master?" Bartimaeus looked up at her through thick lashes, his voice as gentle and lovely as his new form. "Must I scrub your filthy floors? Or perhaps launder your stiffest clothing? _Anything_ to avoid your harsh punishments."_

_In hindsight, Kitty should have just laughed. He was only teasing her, playing the part of the oppressed and the fearful in defiance of her asking him for an honest favour. _

_But Kitty couldn't laugh at it. Not when she knew he had said such things entirely in earnest so many times before. Not when hundreds of his other masters would have looked at his beautiful form, heard his desperate pleas, and razed his essence anyway. _

"_I'm sorry -" she stammered, taking a step away from him. _He's still a slave, _her mind rumbled, _you can't forget that, he wouldn't even _be_ here if he had any choice in it...

_Bartimaeus moved before her mind could even comprehend why – he caught the teacup that had slipped from her fingers barely an inch from the floor. Her thoughts of guilt were rapidly replaced by far more confusing ones: how his skin radiated heat where it pressed against hers, how he smelled, not of sulfur or brimstone, but like summer after a bitter winter._

_Bartimaeus stood again, but didn't move away. "Careful," he said, his wide doe-eyes sparkling. "It's one of your only nice ones."_

_Kitty had never worried that she was like Martin and Timothy, and their not-so-secret regard for each other. She never felt drawn to other women. But Bartimaeus was as lovely to her then as he had ever been, with his half-smirk and teasing eyes, and it didn't matter to her if the rest of him looked female. In the farthest, fuzziest, deepest recesses of her sub-standard human mind, Kitty finally admitted to herself just how badly she wanted _him_, in a purely biological sense._

_He was so close, she could have – but she didn't. She whispered the dismissal instead, and didn't even try to stop the teacup from smashing on the tiles._

* * *

><p>Their last conversation plays itself over and over in her head. She hopes with everything she is that this isn't their final one. The water trembles back and forth in time with the shaking of her hands, but still she waits for him to break the silence.<p>

"You look terrible," he says eventually.

"So do you," she shoots back. "And you don't even have an excuse."

That ruffled his feathers. His essence softens into Ptolemy's form, legs carefully crossed, a hunted look in his borrowed eyes.

"I can have you dismissed, if that's what you want." Kitty forces the words out. "You won't be summoned again."

Bartimaeus laughs. It sounds cold, and hollow. "Trust me Kitty, if I wanted that the kid would be dead. He garbled the protective clauses something awful."

"What _do _you want, then?"

The question sneaks past her lips, tainting the air with all its unspoken possibilities. She tries her best to restrain it, but the sight of him like this, still surprised after all these years that she actually has an interest in what he wants, reignites old hope.

"A promise," he says, so quietly she can barely hear.

She nods. "Anything."

"See, you say that," the djinni speeps out of his chair, forfeiting his view of her for one of the stars. "But you don't really mean it, do you? You _can't_. You don't understand what 'anything' means. Two thousand years is just a number to you, Kitty." He sighs, deep and tired. "You don't understand how heavy they are to carry."

"Two thousand – what?" Kitty leans forward, as much as she is able. "Is this about Ptolemy?"

Bartimaeus bows his head, Ptolemy's dark hair covering his face. "He'll be happy there," he says, his voice a tender, wistful breath. "If you're right. He belonged there. Even when he was just..." The Egyptian boy's delicate fingers trace the thin scar, always so dutifully replicated, on his chin. "He _fit in_ there. Exactly the way you didn't."

Kitty's pride was such that she would not allow herself to cry, even when faced with such undeniable scorn. Would Bartimaeus ever take her form, after she was gone? Would he remember her with such fondness that he couldn't help but recreate her likeness out of himself?

"Ptolemy will not be summoned, Kitty. I want your word on that."

"Of course," she promises. "But you have to promise me something in return."

He tilts his head to hers, listening. Kitty casts her resolve in stone.

"That _I_ will be."

* * *

><p><em>Kitty refused to summon him for almost a year after that. It wasn't fair, she knew: he was a spirit, she was a human. If he wanted to see her, he had to damn well wait until she was ready. <em>

_She kept busy. She worked on the book mostly, spending her days locked up with illegal books on demonology and her typewriter, picking out stilted word after stilted word. She missed Bartimaeus, yes, but her feelings faded as they always did. After eight months she could even write about him – careful and unbiased – without wishing he was there by her side, feeding her words when she had none._

* * *

><p>"You can't be serious. Not even – not even <em>you <em>Kitty, you couldn't be so wilfully stupid to actually _want_ -" His fingers clench and unclench, some combination of nervous, scared and angry, like he's trying to clutch some semblance of sanity from a world so rapidly losing it. "You can't actually _want _this. I know you think you've done away with summoning, but if there's one thing I know, it's that things never change. Soon enough we'll be back where we were, enslaved against our will at the behest of some other petty human empire and you _want to be a part of it?_"

"B –"

"Thousands of years, Kitty! Thousands of years, back under the heel of the magicians you hate! You can't possibly understand what that means! And that's not even taking the naming itself into consideration..."

"Bartimaeus!" Her use of his full name has its desired effect. "Would you shut up for just five minutes? I'm trying to tell you something."

His form stills.

"I thought... That if you weren't going to be alone any more... That you'd want it to be him."

"Kitty..."

"No. Just... Listen, would you? Please."

Bartimaeus nods, and sits Ptolemy's body cross-legged on the floor.

"I'm going to die. Soon. My body's ruined, B... I made peace with that. I made peace with it a long time ago. But now?" She glances at him and his unreadable, unearthly face and wonders if he's as confused by this as she is. "Now I'm thinking that all I've done to make your – _spirits' –_ lives better... It's not enough. I want... I _have_ to do more."

"If it's the book you're worried about -"

"It's not the damn book." Her voice sounds bitter, even to her own ears. "It's you."

His dark eyes widen, like twin stars going supernova.

"I thought I'd have to leave you one day." The words are coming thick and fast now. "That it was selfish of me to keep summoning you, knowing that you felt obligated to care about me because of what I did for you, that in the long run it's better for you spirits not to care about – about _us_. Hell, you said it yourself. You even try not to care about each other." Her wrinkled hands are tying themselves in knots. "I never wanted to leave you alone, B. And now I don't have to."

"Kitty, you don't have to do any more. The naming, it's -"

She looks up at him then and he's blurred with all the fat tears that won't fall. "Ptolemy gave you a last gift. Let this be mine."

Something in his face breaks. He's up in a split second, his bare feet slipping on the tiles to get to her. Once again she feels the heat of his counterfeit skin against hers, this being of air and fire compressed in human form, two hands on her cheeks, his black eyes searching her for any evidence of dishonesty.

"Thank you," he whispers, and presses his lips against hers.


End file.
